If you feel overloaded, you're not crazy. You're normal. But you may feel distracted, frustrated, or half sick, because the average office worker gets 220 messages a day—in e-mails, memos, phone calls, interruptions, and ads.

No wonder a survey of 1,313 managers on four continents found that "one-third of managers suffer from ill health as a direct consequence of stress associated with information overload. This figure increases to 43 percent among senior managers."